Familles, Je Vous Hais! On Architecture and Reproductive Labour

Far from being a haven of tranquillity, the house is not only the battlefield of social and personal conflicts of class, gender, and ethnicity, but it is also arguably the most important workplace. However, while in the pre-modern era the productive vocation of the home was not qualified, the refined division of labour that is a hallmark of early capitalism expelled the production of goods from the home, leaving behind the unwaged and unseen toil of women. The institutionalization of reproductive labour, that is to say the sum of the efforts needed to generate, maintain, educate and care for the workforce, is perhaps the single most effective act of primitive accumulation we can imagine; in this process, half of the population is dispossessed of any control on their work which becomes a simple natural destiny sweetened by the trappings of domesticity and familial love.

Francois Boucher, Le Dejeuner

The home of the middle and working classes, which had hardly been a concern for European architects until the late Renaissance, is invented precisely as a tool to optimize this process. The presentation will use projects and writings developed in France from Sebastiano Serlio to Charles Briseux, the Grands Ensembles, and Lacaton and Vassal to retrace the way domestic space has been choreographed first as a mechanism to separate production and reproduction, and later as a disciplinary microcosm of which the housewife is both victim and villain. Such a critique is all the more urgent today as the last decades have seen the ambiguous blurring of reproductive labour into the ungendered, micro-entrepreneurial field of ‘affective labour’. It is perhaps in such a conjuncture that architecture could claim the responsibility it refused to assume before, and think again housing within and against the realm of labour.

Louise Bourgeois, Cage XXV

We will present this research at the Labour & Architecture Symposium at the AA, 13 November 2015. Join us there!

The Medieval Good Life

This 'Tacuinum Sanitatis' is a medieval Latin version of Ibn Butlan's treatise on health; it contains tens of illustrations of everyday life conditions including the one above, originally titled 'Wake', or the state of being awake. The book and miniatures probably date back to the 11th century - a couple of centuries later, somebody would also add a German translation of the text below the Latin one. These miniatures let us into medieval houses and workshops - and perhaps there was no real difference between the two - letting us see how people slept, ate, worked, and loved. The architectures depicted are all characterized by a lack of real typological differentiation between rooms - kitchens double up as working spaces, bedrooms as offices, stables as living rooms and vice versa. At the same time, though, the houses present a strong individual linguistic expression in terms of decoration and colours. Furniture and textile elements are used to construct privacy as well as a rudimentary functional hierarchy between spaces. Animals and humans coexist. Women work just as much as men. The book is also the product of early Arab scholarship and supremely sane and modern in terms of the kind of advice it gives: no hocus pocus, just medicinal herbs and a lot of good advice on how to eat well, sleep peacefully, and get along with the rest of the world. The good life.

This looks almost too modern:

The Grand Domestic Revolution at AA

Today at 6.30 in the First Year Studio three recent graduates of AA Diploma 14 will present their thesis projects. Diploma 14 is run by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici and for the past few years the unit has been developing a research on housing. If you are in London, drop by to see the work of Jesper Henriksson (co-founder of Hesselbrand), Luis Ortega Govela (member of the AYR collective) and Antonis R. Papamichael (architect at Chipperfield and author of the project pictured above, Alcoves, runner-up at the 2014 GAGA Awards). Jesper, Luis and Antonis will talk about their own perspective on the unit's agenda, and on the challenges of rethinking radical housing solutions for the contemporary city. Luis' thesis dissects the myth of the domestic garage as the locus of entrepreneurship; Antonis' prototype forecasts the end of the rigid individual room and challenges the nuclear family apartment; and Jesper's projects reimagine new technical and formal solutions for the single dweller, an ubiquitous subject that is still largely ignored by typological representation. The work of these three young architects shows us how it is still possible to design spaces of living that do not conform to a standardized formula. In fact, each of the projects, rather than proposing a solution, asks us fundamental questions about the way we live today - our ability to share or be alone, our need to handle work and private life, our aspirations and discontents. Don't miss it.